Tag Archives: Asylum

London, United Kingdom – Migrants, asylum seekers and social justice campaigners in the UK are joining forces to call for the closure of the country’s notorious immigration detention centres amid concerns for the well-being and dignity of those locked inside.

Several hundred protesters gathered recently outside the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook detention centres, two adjacent facilities on the perimeter of London’s Heathrow Airport, the latest in a series of demonstrations intended to draw attention to a system that critics decry as racist and brutal. Continue reading →

London, United Kingdom – Msgana walked for three days and three nights across the desert to escape from Eritrea into Sudan.

Women protest against the detention of asylum seekers outside Harmondsworth detention centre in April [Simon Hooper]

From there, with the help of a family member, she arranged to be transported to Europe. After 30 days hiding aboard a ship, Msgana eventually reached the northern French port of Calais. She was then smuggled onto a lorry bound for the UK and, she believed, a better life.

A Somali man forcibly returned to Mogadishu from the UK under a controversial new scheme to send home failed asylum seekers has described how he was punched and kicked by the British guards who accompanied him, and left bleeding in a cell after having a tooth knocked out.

The man, who did not want to be identified because he fears for his safety, also told Al Jazeera how he was restrained in handcuffs for most of his journey aboard Turkish Airlines flights via Istanbul and pressured by his escorts to sign a document stating that he had returned to his homeland voluntarily.

Speaking on the telephone from the Somali capital, he said he was resigned to dying in a city that is still plagued by ambushes and bombings and considered unacceptably dangerous for returning refugees by most humanitarian organisations.

Protests including hunger strikes and sit-ins are taking place at several immigration detention centres against the UK’s controversial fast-track asylum system in which detainees say they are being treated as criminals and given little chance of proving that their cases are genuine.

The protests started at Harmondsworth detention centre near Heathrow Airport last Friday when about 150 detainees staged a sit-in in a courtyard and threatened to go on hunger strike. A detainee at Harmondsworth said that about 300 people were involved in protests by Thursday, while other protests have taken place at three other centres in southern England.